Eyes
by ensiathe3rd
Summary: Children inherit things from their parents.


Summer Rose inherited her father's eyes.

To most, that fact didn't seem like such a bad thing, if at all. To her father, it was the worst thing that ever could have happened. He made no secret of it either. Rest assured he never blamed or hated his daughter, but by Oum, he hated himself. And from the day of her birth to the day he died, he never stopped.

Though she would learn otherwise, as a kid she didn't pick up that her father's behavior wasn't normal. New dad's didn't take one look at their newborn daughters and break down in grief. Dad's for some reason, weren't supposed to beg their daughter's forgiveness at every chance they got. Normal dads were supposed be able to look their daughters in the eye without turning away in guilt and shame. She didn't know that it was somehow strange that sometimes after he got home late from a mission, she would catch him crying while sitting on the floor by her bed, apologizing profusely for what he made her, his curse that he gave her to bear, the life he forced her to lead, the target he put on her back.

Summer saw nothing strange about it. It was _her_ normal. All she saw was that her daddy was upset, and she could make it better. She would hug him and tell him everything was okay. She'd tell him she loved him to the moon and back. And she did, her dad was a good man, a hero, _her_ hero, and she loved him for it. He would hold her back and call her wonderful, but he never told her he loved her too. It never bothered her until she was older, and by then, she could try to justify that he did love her, loved her more than anything, he just didn't think he deserved to. It didn't stop the hurt, but it kept her from crying in the night.

Dark glasses, hair that fell in his face, refusal to look anyone in the eye, people thought him aloft. But there was more to it than what most people saw. He would avoid mirrors, any reflective surface really. Except when he would go on these long journey's into his head and Summer could watch him staring into the mirror for hours before he snapped out of it and noticed her. If she was there, he would look at her and then back at his reflection on repeat several times before he would collapse to the floor. His hands would shield his eyes from her, and Summer would wrap her arms around him until he came back to himself. He would apologize and everything would be okay.

The times she wasn't there, usually ended with him clawing at his face in anger, and more often than not, he came too after he broke the mirror with his fist. After the first few times, they never really fixed the mirror again. And it was left as broken as the man who damaged it. Suffice to say, the floor outside of the bathroom became her usual homework spot, and reading spot, and knitting or sewing spot, and anything else that she could justify doing there spot.

She was pretty smart kid. She learned pretty quickly that her dad absolutely appalled his eyes, and by extension, her own. When she was young she couldn't put together why he hated them so much, just that he did. She didn't understand why every time someone would comment what a pretty silver her eyes were, he would correct them saying her eyes were gray. She didn't think it really made a difference, and even so, silver sounded so much prettier than gray. Then again, she wanted her father to be happy, and if he wanted her eyes to be gray, her eyes could be gray. And before she knew it, she was correcting the people who dared call her eyes silver. It became a point of where she was shamed and offended by anyone who would mix it up.

Uncomfortable? Yes. However, excessive though it may seem; no one was going around saying that the little Rose girl had silver eyes.

There was no way to know if that would have been enough to keep her safe. After all, those with silver eyes were destined to live the life of a warrior, and destiny was a cruel master. Summer could have been anything in the world, but destiny dictated that she be a hero, and she wanted to be a hero. She wanted it more than anything. And after unlocking her aura and discovering her semblance, there really wasn't anything that could have changed her mind. But the life of a huntress, nothing was set in stone, and whether her eyes were gray or silver wouldn't matter in the long run.

Her father, unsurprisingly, disapproved. For a man who prayed to every power he knew that his daughter be nothing like him, watching his girl strive to be everything he was, nearly drove him to madness. At the very least, it drove him to the church, where he would rant and rave to the heavens, screaming in shame and anger that if he must be punished for his sins, let him be punished for them, and to leave his innocent daughter out of it.

Summer's mother became friends with the grounds' keeper who would let her dad into the chapel in the dead of night. The man who would watch her dad break down at the alter to make sure he didn't go overboard, and would call them to let Summer and her mom know he was safe. Summer learned more than she ever wanted from their whispered conversations that weren't meant for her to hear. The only happiness that Summer knew about everything that was going to happen, was that the old man died when she was twenty peacefully, in his sleep, and surrounded by the people who loved him. So few got that.

Even with the old man's testimony, and her father's steadily growing absence, she may not have seen it as a problem if it wasn't for her catching her mother sitting on the couch in the dead of night, sobbing her heart out. When this happened, Summer would all but teleport into her mother's arms and they held each other throughout the night. It was on one of these nights that her mom kissed her forehead and told her that she was beautiful, inside and out, that she loved everything about Summer, that when it came to her daughter, she had no regrets, and if she could do it over, she wouldn't change a thing.

But things changed. They always did.

They came in the night. A lot of them. Who they were or what they were really after was never discovered. At least, Summer never found out, no one would tell her. All she really knew from that night was that her dad was gone, her mother was dead, and her eyes were in agony before everything went white.

She was thirteen.

Her dad was waiting by her bedside when she awoke. He seemed to have aged 10 years and was much worse for wear. For the first time in her life, his eyes really did look gray. And through heavy tears and desperate apologies, he told her of the curse, that through his carelessness, he had passed on to her. And she couldn't tell him that everything was alright. She wouldn't lie to him like that.

Her mother's ghost followed her in everything she did. It saddened her, but it also pushed her. To train harder, to be better, to never give up, to do anything in her power to make sure that no other soul knew the pain she felt. Her father said she had power and by Oum, she was going to use it.

Ghosts followed her father too. But while hers resolved her, his drove him into the darkest parts of his mind and refused to let him go. And after it was made clear to him that no god was listening to his cries, his nights at the church turned into nights at whatever bar would let him drink away his sorrows, guilt, and self-loathing.

If there was an amount of alcohol that could have healed her father, he never reached it in his lifetime. But he tried, by Oum he tried. Summer lost track of all the times he had found her, drunk out of his mind and the ugly kind of sobbing, and begged her to forgive his mistake. She wondered if he knew how much it hurt her that his "mistake" was her. Nevertheless, she would always tell him that she would forgive if and only if he quit the bottle. Apparently, that was too high a price to ask for.

As she got better, he got worse. Still, friendships didn't last when she spent all her free time taking care of her mad with grief father. After a few years, he was all she had. Then again, she wasn't really sure what was left of her dad to call hers anymore. And that was fine, he was her father, he was still her dad. Nothing else should have mattered.

But it couldn't last. She got older, and before she knew it, she had applied and been accepted into Beacon with surprising ease. She was off the wall with joy. But her father, predictably, had a different reaction. He screamed and cried as he begged her not to leave him, to stay and be safe far away from the monsters of the world (and he didn't just mean the Grimm). A long time ago, she might have given in, but he was as far from the hero of her childhood as she was from the child. And as it stood, she could never live with herself if she stood aside while people were hurt and she could stop it. There was no changing her mind.

She might as well have put the final nail in his coffin herself.

Over the years to come, she must have read his letter a million times. But it never granted her any clarity, any closure. A single folded piece of paper with tearstained apologies in her father's hand didn't change anything. It didn't make the hurt go away. It didn't stop the anger or make her forgive him. It never explained why her father would leave her alone. After all of his statements of never wanting to see her suffer, it didn't explain why he would hurt her more than anything else in Remnant ever had. It didn't wipe her tears. It didn't stop people from calling her hero, a coward. But for all it wasn't, it was the last thing her father ever gave her, all because of the first thing he ever gave her. And because of this, she kept it near her at all times. Just in case, the next time she read it, she'd finally understand.

When Summer left for school the following spring, she left nothing of value behind.

With her, she carried her weapon, her white cloak, her dad's letter, her resolve, and the shame that her father had instilled in her as a child. Her hood, her haphazardly cut hair that fell in her face, and a penchant for staring at her shoes. People thought her shy. But she was more like her father than she ever could believe. Her father hated his eyes, and she hated hers. She would meet her eyes in the mirror and see her father's shamed eyes looking back at her. They screamed guilt and loss at her and reminded her of the power she had and the burden she bore. And she understood. She understood her father's need to claw his eyes out of his skull and break anything that would dare remind him of the color of his eyes. Out of shear will, and fear of repeating her father's mistakes, she never hurt herself or property. It never stopped the temptation.

She was probably lucky to get the team she did. STRQ. An actual living definition of a boy scout, a cynical dark angel, a rugged habitual troublemaker, and her. They were weird, all messed up in their own way, and it was her job to lead them. They all needed her, and she could not fail them. She had to put them first and herself second. Her own worries, fears, and problems didn't matter. Couldn't. And she was fine with that. She was actually, truly, happy. She loved her friends, and they loved her. And maybe against all odds, they worked. Together, they worked, studied, cried, laughed, fought, won. It was the happiest four years of her life. And she wouldn't have minded if it stayed like that forever.

It didn't.

They were hunters and huntresses. No one said it would be easy, but it was the life they chose. They lost friends along the way. They lost bits of themselves that they could never hope to get back. They made mistakes, costly ones, ones that no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't fix it. But considering all of the odds that were stacked against them at all times, they faired pretty well.

It was quickly cemented in her mind to hide her nature. Even more so than it had ever been growing up. The world wasn't ready to know that the legends of old were real. Most people wouldn't have believed her anyway. People weren't ready to know of the power she held within. Power was maddening, the quest for it even more so. Hers was never meant to share. She learned that much. As a result, only a few people knew what she was. She liked to keep it that way.

Every day, her father's actions in her childhood made more and more sense. The knowledge haunted her. Summer didn't want to be what her father was. She strived to be better. She resolved to not make the same mistakes he did.

She did well, but no one was perfect.

Time moved on, she loved, she was loved, she fell in love. She could have been happy. She had more than she ever would have thought possible the day she left for Beacon. A life, a home, a family. Things she would give her life for a thousand times over. Someone who looked at her like she looked at her dad. She was somebody's hero. That should have been all she ever needed. And it could have been. And maybe it was fate, or destiny, or maybe they just got greedy. What they had was enough, they wanted more, and after that they couldn't go back.

It was startling, the day when all of her father's actions suddenly made sense. When she finally understood with painful, soul-shattering clarity, everything he ever felt. The anger, the shame, the guilt, the self-loathing. She knew it. After all she tried not make the same choices her father did, she wasn't that different from him after all. And it hurt more than anything else she had ever felt.

Still, there was something else there. When the time came, her tears weren't of sadness. Quite the opposite, she had never felt that kind of joy, never felt a love so strong. She held on to that feeling with every part of her being. After everything was said and done, that feeling was all that ever mattered. And in that moment, after all the years of hating the color of her eyes, Summer couldn't think of it as anything but extraordinary. It was a wonderful, beautiful, color, and she loved everything about it.

Also.

Her eyes weren't gray.

Her baby's eyes were undeniably silver.

 **AN: and that's that, hope you enjoyed, please leave a review if you have time. Ensia**


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